Buzzsumo: the perfect tool for content marketers

As someone who is still relatively new to the world of digital marketing, getting to grips with the various tools available has taken some time. However, Buzzsumo is one that I have had very little trouble getting my head around and I now use it on a near daily basis.

What is Buzzsumo?

Buzzsumo is a platform that allows you to find engaging pieces of content and discover new potential outreach opportunities. The site allows you to search for content that has received the most shares, links and comments. It also allows you to find the key influencers in your specific area, monitor brand mentions, backlinks and much more. Below I will outline some of the key features of Buzzsumo along with how and why I use them so regularly.

Content Research

In my opinion this is the most useful tool available on Buzzsumo and it is the one that I use the most often. The content research tool allows you to trawl through millions of pieces of content to find the most popular. Simply search for any topic or domain and it will return the most shared pieces of content on that area from the past year. You can narrow down your search by adding a variety of filters that will tailor your results to help you find the most relevant pieces of content, whether you’re looking for a specific format (e.g. infographics, guest posts, videos etc.), a specific country, a certain language or if you just want to specify the time frame. Once you’ve carried out your search you can see how many shares each piece of content received and how these are split over various social media channels. You can also see any backlinks that content gained and view who shared it.

Within the ‘Content Research’ section of the site you can also search for backlinks to a specific URL or domain, find any trending new stories or articles, and further analyse all of the content on a certain topic. The ‘Content Analysis’ tool shows you a breakdown of all the pieces of content for a specific keyword or domain, and displays the data in graphs and charts showing information such as the average length of the content, what channels have been used to share it, and the total shares by day published. You can also save important pieces of content into lists for easy retrieval at a later date.

These tools help identify what content is best received by your target audience, and shows what areas are lacking in content. All of this means you can assign resources to creating content that your audience wants to engage with in an area that is not already overloaded.

Influencers

Buzzsumo’s influencer tool will find the key Twitter influencers in your industry by searching for topics, domains or usernames. Once again you can apply filters to make sure you are shown the most relevant influencers, those who are likely to interact and engage with your content. You can search for specific types (e.g. companies, bloggers, journalists etc.), select the location they are from, and make sure you are searching for active users who engage with their audience. All of the influencers can be ranked in order of their followers, their retweet and reply ratio, the average number of retweets and both their page and domain authority. Once you have completed your search you can see what each influencer has shared and save them to an outreach list – a very useful tool – meaning all of your key influencers are saved in one place. It’s much easier to share you content with the people who are most likely to engage with it.

Monitoring

The final set of tools available on Buzzsumo allow for monitoring reports to be set up for a variety of different categories, including brand mentions (for both you and for your competitors), keyword mentions, backlinks to a domain and any content created by a specific website or author. One of the most useful tools within the monitoring sections is the email alerts that keep you up to date with any new or trending content for your selected topics, domains or authors. These alerts can be used to monitor how well your content is being received by your audience or to highlight any trending issues in your industry. Once you have set up what you want to monitor, all the information is displayed in a graph covering the last week, two weeks, month, three months or six months, including the total number of mentions that topic has received that day, week or over the past 30 days. Once again this is an extremely useful tool as it allows you to stay on top of any breaking news stories and monitor how many mentions or links your site, or your competitor’s site, is receiving.

These are just a few of my favourite tools available through Buzzsumo – still not convinced it’s right for you, give it a try and see for yourself.